080718 I’m almost afraid to start, because I won’t know when to stop. Oh wait--actually I will know when to stop, because the timer will go off. I guess what I mean is, I’m reluctant to start because once again, I have nothing interesting or passionate to think about or say. Hey wait!! I finally get it (again)!! *That’s the whole point!* It’s like when you go to the damn burrito store to make the burritos, you don’t ONLY DECIDE TO SHOW UP FOR WORK WHEN YOU’RE PASSIONATELY IN THE MOOD TO MAKE BURRITOS! YOU SHOW UP TO WORK EVERY GOD DAMNED DAY BECAUSE THAT’S YOUR JOB! When you go to the post office at fuck o’clock to start sorting the mail, you don’t just skip that part and go directly to driving the little truck around like some kind of goofy little boy. YOU STAND THERE LIKE A ROBOT AND SORT THE MAIL FIRST BECAUSE THAT’S PART OF THE GOD DAMNED JOB! When you pretend to be a teacher, you don’t just call up your students and regale them when you suddenly have a great idea while you’re drinking four beers and reading articles off the Internet that no-one but you could possibly be smart enough to have discovered and read and been excited by, YOU PREPARE YOUR CLASSES AND HAVE SOMETHING READY TO WORK ON EVERY FUCKING DAY, MONDAY OR ANY OTHER DAY, 9:00 IN THE MORNING OR WHATEVER OTHER FUCKING TIME YOU GET SCHEDULED FOR, BECAUSE THAT’S YOUR FUCKING JOB! Now here’s the next question I have lined up for you:[^how did I decide which questions to pick, and which order to line them up in? HINT: IT’S BASICALLY COMPLETELY RANDOM HAHAHAHAHAHA BUT DON’T TELL THE STUDENTS HAHAHA!!] WHY DID YOU AGREE TO DO ANY OF THESE JOBS? Well, let’s see. 1. the burrito job I took because I needed some money. My dad would’t pay for my fried chicken and booze and used typewriters and speakers and pizza and marijuana and everything else along with my tuition, so there ya go. And I wasn’t ingenious enough to figure out some other way to make extra income. So there ya go. Any inspiration or passion or magical moments that came from the burrito job were purely bonus, purely by accident--and if you ask me, that’s part of what made their magic more potent. It’s kind of like the Pleiades thing again. 2. the post office job I took because I needed some money. My substitute-teaching sucked, and my previous full time teaching job kicked me out because I sucked at it and didn’t really belong there anyway according to that one vitamin-mongering, swindle-beleiving, demon-fighting, platitude-mouthing leathery old bag of piety that asked me secret spy questions about my FAITH via her weird dumb cunning misguided smart goofy son. Any magical moments that came from the post office job were also coincidental, and usually had to do with the intersection of solitude, occasional people (and their cats), and large migratory birds. Again, what happens when you’re busy with something else and don’t have time to be pretentious. 3. the teaching job I took because the substitute-teaching job was literally starting to kill me. I woke up one day in the detention room, wondering what that ammonia smell was, and looked down to see that I had gotten used cat litter in the cuffs of my pants. That was a very quiet, stinky form of a non-dramatic rock bottom. I was a ghost. A cat-piss-reeking, shuffling, pale, flabby ghost. So when someone said, oh, uh, there’s this eAchieve thing and we thought you might be interested in applying for it, I was like yeah. I honestly didn’t have a lot of confidence. But I had enough hope left to be like, OK, let’s answer this guy’s questions--and you know what? Accidentally, coincidentally, right at the end of the interview, I said something passionate and magical. And I got the job. And so now I have to do the job. Plus I’m kind of addicted to sushi and clean laundry and not having to never repair my car and not being constantly sour-pussed around the girls because of murky financial things that are totally not their fault. So yeah. Let’s just fucking make the burritos, sort the mail, and type whatever shit we got to type into this computer, and get the extra thousand bucks, and be ready for when school starts again, and play the game with gusto, and see what happens next. Trust me. It’ll be fun.